Hey Interesting Topic, What’s Your Name?

I want to propose the embrace of an ugly word: logogenology (low-go-jen-ahl-oh-gee). It comes from three Greek words, logos [word], gennesi [birth], and logia [study of], and it names the study of language origins. In other words, it refers to this blog’s beat.

Normally I dislike academic coinages, but in this case I think we need to recognize that there is a community of scholars who began in many fields—e.g., linguistics, literature, biology, psychology, archaeology, and anthropology—who share common questions and are interested in one another’s results. Thus a biologist might learn from a linguist and come to a conclusion that is of more interest to that biologist than to most linguists. Instead of identifying themselves as biologists and linguists, it might be better to focus on their shared community and say , “I’m a logogenologist,” even if one has to add, “That’s somebody who studies language origins.”

I have come to this position after reading an interesting paper by two people calling themselves anthropologists, Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis. The paper is titled “Wild Voices” and is published in Current Anthropology. They begin their essay, “Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human. So it must be at least part of our job to explain why it is that out of 220 primate species, only humans talk.” The authors seem to be claiming that explaining speech is a part of anthropology, but they concede immediately that their account of language origins requires taking the work from many other fields of study.

The third paragraph says: “A word of warning. The way we have constructed this article is novel, and we ask the reader not to be surprised that we conjoin a wide range of previously unconnected fields. Our basic idea is simple: using language is so closely bound up with everything else humans do—singing, ritual, kinship, economics, and religion—that no separate, isolable theory of its origins is likely to work.” While the authors seem to be writing for anthropologists, they acknowledge that their data comes from many other fields.

Members of the language-origins community will find nothing startling in the connections the authors make. So why not just admit that there is a community of scholars who use data originally developed in a variety of other fields to answer questions that are peculiar to the new community? The main logogenological question is how did language begin, and there are a variety of sub-questions too such as when did it begin, what bodily and cognitive changes were required, how did it become universal to the species, etc. The first section heading in the Knight/Lewis paper poses a common sub-question of the field, “Why Do Only Humans Talk?”

The authors give a shockingly brief answer: “Since language is not a system for navigating within the physical or biological world, it follows that nonhuman primates—creatures whose existence is confined to the realm of brute facts, not institutional ones—will have no need for either words or grammar.”

What? Where did that premise come from? It seems to be based on an anthropological dictum that “words and grammar are means of navigating within a shared virtual world.” Here we see the circular trap that comes from acting as though one of logogenology’s contributory fields is able to answer logogenological questions. Anthropology is the study of the various virtual worlds (cultures and institutions) created by humanity. Thus, the element of language that interests anthropologists is how language helps members of a group navigate that virtual world. This foundation forces the answer to at least two sub-questions: (1) why do only humans talk? Other animals have no need for speech, and (2) when did speech begin? After humans had begun to create a virtual world rich enough to require help in navigating it.

Knight and Lewis might respond that it just happens that anthropology alone is sufficient to answer these questions. But Chomskyan linguists offer different answers. (1) Only humans talk because they alone are able to organize words according to a recursive syntax, and (2) speech began after a number of humans had developed the ability to think using that recursive syntax. The result of these rival answers is that anthropologists and Chomskyans quarrel a great deal and the work of science—drawing conclusions from empirical data—bogs down. Indeed, the claim to be a science looks laughable.

Lets come at the questions from a logogenological perspective. (1) Why do only humans talk? The abstract answer is short enough: only the human lineage went through the series of evolutionary changes necessary to make language possible. What were those concrete changes? That is for logogenologists to determine. Anthropologists and Chomskyans both, if they want to work out these changes, must leave their field of training and work as members of the field studying language origins. (2) When did language begin? Before answering that we have to draw up a list of changes necessary for speech to be possible and discover when each of them appeared. The result will be a series of empirically validated answers, not a list of deductions based on a field’s a priori definitions.

The Knight/Lewis paper asks logogenological questions and takes its data from many fields but then tries to fit the answers into anthropology-shaped boxes. The authors need to recognize that they are no longer working as anthropologists and come at their conclusions from the same direction they asked their questions.

I am going to post a second report on the Knight/Lewis paper in a few days.